Standing Out

Phew - it was not fun at all having that painful Google page rank of ‘0′ for the last month, especially after all of the stuff out there saying that a page rank of ‘0′ means you’re being penalized…yada yada yada. It was devastating! I kept racking my brain trying to figure out what in the world I could have done to be penalized.

But alas, it’s over. Both my blog and my website are out from under the ‘0′ curse. The rankings are still not great (3 and 2 respectively) but they are not terrible, either, all things considered. I haven’t done as much linking as I would like to yet and I’m still getting articles together to publish, which adds a pretty big stream of incoming links.

So if you’re out there biting your nails like I was, here’s my advice. Hold on! And do these things. I can’t be absolutely positive they helped, but they most certainly didn’t hurt.

1. Create an account with Google Webmasters and upload your sitemap. If you have already done this - CHECK IT. I’m almost positive my site was ranked ‘0′ because I had broken links in the index, because I indexed my site and then went and changed it without telling Google (bad bad bad). If you need a sitemap generator, use this one: www.xml-sitemaps.com/
2. Submit URL removal requests to Google for the broken links. I used their “expedited” process rather than waiting for the site to be crawled again.
3. Submit at least ONE article to a large, popular site like ezinearticles.com. I did this recently, and voila! My site climbed in the rankings. I can’t be positive that just one article submission helped, but again, all I know is that I did these things and the next thing I knew, my rank was improved. So take it for what it’s worth.
4. Get some incoming links - really. Just try. You can hook up to startupnation.com and get involved in the message boards, creating a signature that includes a link to your site (make sure that the links are in keywords, not just a URL). Example: Tia is a virtual assistant. Notice how the URL is linked to the keywords “virtual assistant” rather than, Tia is a virtual assistant and this is her website: http://www.allamericanadmin.com. Google doesn’t really care about links like that.
5. Learn about improving your site. I’ve done this. Admittedly I am addicted to my website and my blog and I have more email newsletters coming to me about SEO and SEM than I can possibly take in. But why not? If you have the opportunity to learn something, do it. A great place to start is: Young Entrepreneur blog’s weekly posts on SEO.
   
6. Make sure your site has content. I have at least 300 words on every page except the contact page. And my blog posts are typically on the long side. You need content because tags mean nothing unless the keywords are actually on that page. You can’t just put a keyword in the title tag and leave it unsupported in the document itself. Remember writing paragraphs in grade school? Your teacher said that you must “support” the opening statement. Likewise, you must “support” your meta keyword tags by including those keywords throughout the content.
   

Hope this helps! Those simple changes improved my site.

Cheers,

Tia

To go along with my new website, I’ve decided to give this blog an overhaul as well. Not just in design but in platform & audience.

A lot has happened in the past week. Most of you know by now that I’m a virtual assistant and work from home mom. The whole reason that I even started a company was so I could go beyond just myself and possibly change the lives of other single moms by providing work from home opportunities for them through it. Well that vision is finally becoming a reality and I’m THRILLED about it. I have another VA on board with me named Stefanie and I’m glad to help her get on the road to success.

There really is nothing better than the feeling you get by helping someone else!

So that said, I’m going to be focusing mainly on Virtual Assistant and Home-based success in this blog now. I’m very excited about this new direction and am hoping the reach will grow and many more women like Stefanie will come to know financial freedom through working for themselves.

To success!

Cheers,

Tia

Thanks to yesterday’s post on one of my favorite blogs (found on my blogroll - Escape from Cubicle Nation), I found out about a great article on becoming a lifestyle entrepreneur, originally found here.

The article outlines three types of lifestyle entrepreneurs - time-minimalist, nomadic, and ones who do it for love.

I am part of the way into it - absolutely entranced by his very detailed outline on how to be a time-minimalist entrepreneur creating passive income…I love this article. You will, too. Go read it now!

Cheers!

Yesterday I thought I just didn’t have any time at all to devote to re-doing my website. But since Fridays are my “light” days - you know, the days to do laundry and go grocery shopping - I spend the last, oh, maybe six or seven hours on and off re-doing my website.

Check it out: http://www.allamericanadmin.com. It still needs a ton of SEO work and probably another makeover but I’m happy with it so I’m leaving it be for now.

Just FYI, All-American Admin is my virtual assistant company. You can read more about it at the URL provided above.

Cheers!

Recently I had a frank discussion with my sister about the goings-on in my life, and I was complaining about the fact that I never seem to get anything accomplished - at least not what I set out to do. Things always come up that throw me off.

She responded with something so simple that it’s almost impossible to do, because we are highly complex beings that expect things to be more difficult than they are.

She said, ‘Bind yourself to your word.’ Essentially, when you say you’re going to do something - force yourself to go through with it. Don’t lie to yourself. Keep the promises you make to yourself.

Seems easy, right? Wrong. We keep promises to others because of our reputation with them…

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